12.19

So here I am hideously behind on my posts, so naturally the book gives me the longest chapter of anything yet.

After the Disciplinary Committee meeting, I don’t think anyone believed Lena would show up at school the next day.

“After Lena’s rich uncle showed up to make it clear he’d hurt everyone if they didn’t let Lena go to school and everyone fearfully agreed, I don’t think anyone believed Lena would show up at school the next day.”

Oh, and I didn’t mention this last time, but while they do so, they’re quoting Martin Luthor King (second official black person!) and referencing how these days you’re not allowed to prevent a kid from going to school, because parents upset Lena broke a window in a rage are exactly like segregation and Jim Crow.

Also, he’s not including himself in that “anyone”. The book is getting more and more muddled as Emothan describes his surroundings like he’s trying to be a very opinionated third person narrator.

No one else knew she had given up the right to go to school once.

I don’t really remember this. I know she was homeschooled originally, but she seems to have simply left her last school in the wake of Ridley’s sirening and disappearance, there’s been nothing about her giving up any rights there.

She wasn’t going to let anyone take it away from her again. To everyone else, school was prison. To Lena, it was freedom.

Also, I just don’t believe this.

There are kids who like being at school and there’s a good case that, say, terminally ill kids are better off going. But that’s largely about routine. Lena didn’t grow up going to school and she doesn’t expect to make friends. She seems to be showing up out of plain bloodymindedness. She wants to be normal and school is normal so she’s going to school. And that’s a perfectly good motivation, so why not own up to it?

I think maybe the idea was to be that she actually liked learning – she did seem to like English class, at least – but since there’s been almost none of the book set at the school, let alone during classes, that hasn’t been really established. Plus, I’m not sure how well love of learning holds up if your teachers also hate you.

Only it didn’t matter, because that was the day Lena became a ghost at Jackson—nobody looked at her, spoke to her, sat near her at any table, bleacher, or desk.

I thought that’s how it’s been since day one, when you saw them parting before her, and made explicit on day a couple more when you talked about how the girls were freezing her out in English class.

By Thursday, half the kids at school were wearing the Jackson Angels T-shirt, with those white wings on their backs. The way they looked at her, it seemed half the teachers wished they could wear them, too.

Okay BUT WHY.

Are they scared of her, or repulsed, or just annoyed she’s caused so much disruption and more concerned with quiet than whose fault it is? Did she enrage General Teacher Lee with her talk of the Civil War and Lincoln probably not actually eating babies at every last meal? Do they have just that look of seething disapproval people get for goth kids every time they see her outfit?

Because these are all different things. While I’m very willing to treat the whole angels thing as just a threat, their stated motivator was fear, and I do think there’s a difference between bullying because it’s fun and bullying because you’re scared – bullying is a bad reaction to events, but one motivation is more sympathetic. Especially when this isn’t like being afraid you’ll catch gay cooties – Lena really did smash a window and while they’re wrong Lena caused the mess at the dance, they’re right that someone did so, and if they think she’s the culprit, they’re right to be terrified.

He decides to quit basketball.

Coach was furious. After all the hollering died down, he just shook his head. “You’re crazy, Wate. Look at the season you’re havin’, and you’re throwin’ it away on some girl.” I could hear it in his voice. Some girl. Old Man Ravenwood’s niece.

Yeah, because only absolute loathing for a girl would lead to a coach’s FURIOUS RAGE of saying he’s disappointed his star player is quitting because he’s hung up on his girlfriend.

The show/tell divide of all this is staggering. It’s like the author knows certain things are supposed to happen to complete our small town cliche list, but has no idea what they should actually look like, so we’re told ITEM TEN COMPLETE followed by a totally different description.

Anyway, “I could hear it in his voice.” is exactly as far as anything goes, because no one dares actually say anything.

If Mrs. Lincoln had put the fear of God into them, Macon Ravenwood had given people in Gatlin a reason to fear something even worse.

Seriously would you listen to yourself.

The truth.

Yeah I really don’t think “I can fuck your economy so hard your great-grandchildren will still be living in poverty and also let me tell you how much blackmail I have on everyone, now do whatever I say” is really “the truth”.

But what’s really important is oh What if we couldn’t stop it? What if Lena had been right all along, and after her birthday the girl I knew disappeared?

Except there appears to be no evidence whatsoever that happens, and every time Ridley shows up she’s an active counterpoint – Ridley was doing her siren stuff pre-claiming in defense of Lena, and she just recently showed up to do siren stuff post-claiming again in defense of Lena. If Ridley was nicer in general before, I think we can guess that personality change is probably just the result of everyone being dicks to her for so long.

And that’s assuming she wasn’t always been willing to fight back like this – given the family’s only concept of good and evil behavior appears to be which hat you’re wearing, Ridley could easily have been just as vindictive and unwilling to take shit back then when people pushed her – again, look at how she acts when she comes for the party, she’s friendly until people start telling her to GTFO and only then does she get nastier. And the closet thing she does to actually wrong, hurting Emothan, looks an awful lot like he’s getting bleedoff damage from her, because they explicitly say she’ll die if she keeps pushing against the wards and everything he experiences he describes as radiating from where he’s touching her and getting worse over time. And that totally fits with how Lena talks – back then, before Ridley’s claiming, Ridley was protective of her and willing to fight for her, while Lena appears to have been more of a wallflower.

“AMONGST PERSONNES OF POWERE, THERE BEING TWINNE FORCES FROM WHYCHE SPRING ALL MAGICK, THE DARKNESSE & THE LIGHT.”
“I think we’ve got the whole Darkness and Light thing worked out. You think we could get to the good part? The part called, Loopholes for Your Claiming Day?
How to Vanquish a Rogue Cataclyst? How to Reverse the Passage of Time?” I was frustrated, and Lena wasn’t talking.

Okay, so…I think this is them continuing the translation they found at the back of the book. You remember, it was inexplicably the only thing added, no explanation for where it was being translated from. They’re apparently translating more of that passage that they’ve found and again inexplicably is somehow there in the list of spells. Into archaic misspelled English because the schools have all canceled the grammar part of an English education and this is how the kids thinks words are spelled now I guess.

We were supposed to be at the science fair, watching Alice Milkhouse soak an egg in vinegar, listening to Jackson Freeman argue there was no such thing as global warming, and Annie Honeycutt counter with how to make Jackson a green school.

It’s almost like people in the town have a variety of interests and viewpoints in this town instead of being a giant lump of groupthink. But I guess if you find everything non-rich-hot-people think is boring, it doesn’t matter how much variety there is among the peasants, it’s all still boring.

I stared at the Algebra II book hanging out of my backpack. It didn’t seem like there was anything worth learning at this place anymore. I’d learned enough in the last few months.

There are so many, many ways this can be a valid point in supernatural + high school settings! The book has failed to show any of them!

We still know next to nothing about the magic side of things, and the only thing we do know is it’s an exclusive club so he’ll never be part of it, so whatever little he’s learned about spells in the meantime is useless to him. And it has been very, very little since apparently all they’ve been doing is translating the Setting section of the book, and now they’re reaching Character Construction:

“Here’s more about Cataclysts.
“THE GREATEST OF THE DARKNESSE BEING THE POWERE CLOSEST TO THE WOLD & THE UNDYRWOLD, THE CATA-CLYSTE. THE GREATEST OF THE LIGHT BEING THE POWERE CLOSEST TO THE WOLD & THE UNDYRWOLD, THE NAT-URAL.

I bet this section also explains there’s a division between PC and NPC classes. Single-power guys like illusionists and even shapechangers are presumably the NPCs, meant to fill in if the party is lacking anyone with that particular ability or else make a good antagonist with easier weaknesses to exploit rather than being boringly well-rounded (with the bonus of being easier to run for the DM, since you only need to keep track of one ability).

Also, this now confirms that the light side, which as described is just as unnatural and freaky as the dark, is “natural” and also yes, powers have a set alignment.

WHERE THERE IS NOT ONNE THERE CANNOT BE THE OTHERE, AS WITHOUTE DARKNESSE THERE CAN BE NO LIGHT.”

Okay so back to the story, this really only works with twins. Otherwise, it’s suggesting that her mom only went dark when she had Lena, because otherwise there wouldn’t be the requisite pair, and that in turn killing Lena’s mom will make her go quantum grey until she has a kid and the waveform collapses again (ooh, it’d also mean that if Lena’s mom kills her, she might stop being dark. Wouldn’t that be a horrible setup – you’re forced to be evil but you remember enough of your former life to not want to be. Sort of your werewolf setup, you can’t control yourself but you’re still you inside. If you kill your opposite number, the curse is lifted, and since you’re evil now, there’s nothing to hold you back from it.)

“See? You’re not going Dark. You’re Light because you’re the Natural.”

Yes thank you Emothan I get the shitty plot too.

This conforms that presumably thaumaturgist or whatever ending it had is light, allowing the kid to stay with her family, and more importantly, how awful must it have been for Ridley when she manifested as dark. How long do you think she was in denial about it? Lena’s described her as deliberately messing with the other kids, but she also says the most Ridley did was make the boys fight over her, which seems like like it’s automatic manifestation and remarkably tame given how much emphasis she put on how Ridley could’ve ordered them all off a cliff. Lena smashing windows is accidental, and that seems far more specific, plus Ridley is apparently ordinary physical hot so it really wouldn’t take much more of a push to get boys fighting over her.

(Also, how does this fit with the book making the choice? Is the book also picking their powers? Do normal casters only get their powers based on what future-them will pick, and doesn’t that open up time paradoxes in which having a power prior to the decision will affect their experiences that determine their decision? Maybe that’s the dire warning about making sure the casters pick at sixteen is about, it’s a mistranslation and the real concern is getting eaten by paradox if they don’t pick the one that they’re supposed to based on their powers.)

Anyway, Lena says despite the fact there’s a set list of black and white powers, it’s not black and white.

“AT THE TYME OF CLAIMING, THE TRUTHE WILL BE MADE MANIFESTE. WHAT APPEARS DARKNESSE MAYE BE THE GREATEST LIGHT, WHAT APPEARS LIGHT MAYE BE THE GREATEST DARKNESSE.”

You know what’d help here? Having any idea how the other powers worked. Our only other example of similar powers appears to be both light side ones. How can you confuse the two?

Also, this just makes Ridley’s first conversation a plot hole. She says Lena’s going to go dark and when told that no, Lena’s a natural, says that no she isn’t because Ridley’s met a natural, and Pretty Suit says that no, she’s only met a cataclyst and never a natural.

That all makes no sense now. Why would Ridley be arguing Lena’s abilities weren’t consistent with the dark caster type she’s familiar with when she’s trying to argue Lena is a dark caster? Why wouldn’t she say Lena’s abilities were obviously cataclyst type and have Pretty Suit say no, they’re definitely natural-type and she just wouldn’t know the difference because she’s only see the dark version.

“Then it gets really complicated. I’m not even sure I understand the words.
“FOR THE DARKE MATTERE MAYDE THE DARKE FYRE, & THE DARKE FYRE MAYDE THE POWERES OF ALL LILUM IN THE DAEMON WOLD & CASTERS OF DARKNESSE & LIGHT. WITHOUT ALL POWERE THERE CAN BE NO POWERE. THE DARKE FYRE MAYDE THE GREAT DARKNESSE & THE GREAT LIGHT. ALL POWERE IS DARKE POWERE, AS DARKE POWERE IS EVEN THE LIGHT.”

I agree, that is annoying to read. In such situations I find the best solution is to rewrite it in normal words, which is to say, deleting the goddamn Es and Ys:

“FOR THE DARK MATTER MADE THE DARK FIRE, AND THE DARK FIRE MADE THE POWERS OF ALL LILUM IN THE DAEMON WOLD(?) AND CASTERS OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT. WITHOUT ALL POWER THERE CAN BE NO POWER. THE DARK FIRE MADE THE GREAT DARKNESS AND THE GREAT LIGHT. ALL POWER IS DARK POWER, AS DARK POWER IS EVEN THE LIGHT.”

There, see? The only bit that’s ambiguous is the possibility that wold is something other than world, and that seems pretty unlikely. Also, I’m just going to assume daemon is demon – sure, it has an actual meaing of its own but come on like the author cares. Either way it isn’t important at the moment, because they’re distinct from the casters. (Also hey, so there’s another non-caster magic user.)

So, Dark Thing A made Dark Thing B made “the powers of lilum in the demon world” and also casters of both type. Also, power is an all or nothing deal, and all of it stems from darkness. Wow, this sure would be meaningful if only I had any fucking idea what the definitions of any of these words were.

“Dark Matter? Dark Fire? What is this, the Big Bang for Casters?”
“What about Lilum? I’ve never heard of any of this, but then again, nobody tells me anything.

You are being out-technologied by the oldest people in your town. And that’s even with this damn book muddying the search results in the first place! Googling “lil mythology” and “lilu mythology”, which is wise considering it seems they’re translating Latin so the final letters are likely not part of the root word, also gets me A lilu or lilû is a masculine Akkadian word for a spirit, related to Alû, demon. and includes a helpful link to Lilith there too.

Mind you, that shouldn’t be necessary. A character who can’t even think lilum – Lilith? on their own is a character I shouldn’t be reading about.

“Maybe Lilum is an old word for Casters, or something.”

YOU FUCKING MORON.

Okay, look, lilum-Lilith is pissing me off because she should have that sort of minimum education. It’s totally understandable for a person in general to not think of it, just not a homeschooled magic user with a Latin dictionary.

But this here? Not fucking education. The dark power made the lilum AND ALSO the casters.

Now, this could be a translation fuckup. There’s that funny one where misunderstanding grammar leads to Jesus riding both a donkey and her colt into Jerusalem in Matthews, because in Hebrew, “a thing, and also a particular thing” is equivalent to “a thing, specifically a particular thing”. If something like that’s going on, then it’d “lilum, specifically the caster subtype”.

But this is a world where on the fly translations from Latin end up in rhyming English, so I’m thinking we’re not meant to be thinking about the lost in translation factor. And solely looking at the translation they’ve got. You fucking moron. If casters is an old word for them, why is “casters” right next to it, connected by an “&” no less?

He sulks about how she’s really remote these days and he thinks it’s because she thinks he’s one of them and all unhappy after half the town turned against her, to which I say, god damn, small town and half is the best you can do? That’s not even a majority! He keeps trying to talk to her all day.

In history, she wasn’t there while we reenacted the Lincoln-Douglas Debate, and Mr. Lee tried to make me argue the Pro-Slavery side, most likely as punishment for some future “liberally minded” paper I was bound to write.

You were the one who couldn’t stop whining about how much it bothered you to think the teachers weren’t reading your papers.

Also that’s totally normal – someone has to reenact that side of it, and teachers often like giving it to the kid whose views oppose it most. Maybe the guy doing Lincoln turned in a paper titled “Worse Than Hitler – Why Getting Shot Was Too Damn Good For That Bastard Lincoln”.

I’m not going anywhere, L. You can’t shut me out.
That’s when I realized she could.

The horror.

By lunch, I couldn’t take it anymore. I waited for her to come out of Trig and I pulled her over to the side of the hall, dropping my backpack to the floor. I took her face in my hands, and drew her in to me.
Ethan, what are you doing?
This.
I pulled her face into mine with both hands. When our lips touched

Well. That is certainly a thing someone is capable of doing in response to their girlfriend avoiding them.

Also:

I bent down to pick up her copy of Bukowski’s Pleasures of the Damned and her battered spiral notebook. The notebook was practically falling apart, but then again, she’d had a lot to write about lately.

I went through a notebook every two months when I was in school, almost exactly. And I never skipped school, and I had chores, and I had actual pets and not magic surveillance energizer bunny dogs that didn’t need me to do anything for them, plus all those videogames I played, and… Basically, she should be churning through the things.

But anyway she explains that since she’s doomed they should just give up now and avoid each other.

“Ethan, I know you think this can have a happy ending, and for a while maybe I did, too. But we don’t live in the same world, and in mine, wanting something badly enough won’t make it happen.”

Uh, no, I think you’re confused. In his world wanting something is irrelevant to making it happen. In your world thinking makes stuff happen by magic. That is literally your entire magic system.

Then she starts explaining that they’re forever apart, because she can cast spells while he has only vague and unspecified magic abilities. And then she says he’s one of them, because Emothan was thinking that so obviously it’d come up, but not in a judgey way because Emothan is too perfect for that, she’s just worried.

after I’m Claimed, you’re still going to be here. You’re going to have to walk down these halls and those streets again, and I probably won’t be there. But you will, for who knows how long, and you said it yourself—people in Gatlin never forget anything.
Two years.
What?
That’s how long I’ll be here.

This actually flows nicely, it’s just totally out of place. This would have been a good exchange early on – when he first tries to get to know her, she says he shouldn’t bother and she doesn’t want to mess up his life in town, and he replies that he’s planning to get out first chance he gets.

Emothan is defined by his desire to leave the town. She must know by now. So saying this here should be the real betrayal – her admission she doesn’t think he’ll leave. It’d be a good echo of his own patronizing thoughts about Link, how he’s impressed by Link’s decisiveness even as he thinks it’ll never work.

But instead, the focus is on him asserting his goals. All she says is that she doesn’t want to ruin his life for two years then, because apparently she just didn’t know about his defining goal to leave the place. Then she says she’s breaking up with him because she loves him so much, and he goes to sit alone in the lunchroom.

Gatlin was gray; the clouds had drifted in. I wouldn’t call it a storm, exactly; it hadn’t snowed in years. If we were lucky, we got a flurry or two, maybe once a year. But it hadn’t snowed a single day since I was twelve.

Forgotten, of course, is him constantly telling us about how Lena’s very existence is fucking up the weather. Also, given she does that stuff accidentally, directly asking her for some snow seems like it’d be easy.

I wished I could tell her I didn’t care if everyone in this town hated me, because it didn’t matter. I was lost before I found her in my dreams, and she found me that day in the rain. I knew it seemed like I was always the one trying to save Lena, but the truth was she had saved me,

I think this is the author attempting to salvage the fact it sure does seem like he’s always the one trying to save Lena. It fails, largely due to how Emothan’s only non-Lena emotions seem to be contempt and disdain.

Link heads over and we learn Lena gave him a song she wrote, so he sulks more. He doesn’t even think to mind that apparently she let Link read her writing when she’s still hiding that from Emothan. She was talking to Link, just not to me. because that’s the one and only thing here that matters. What she says, who cares about that.

Also, Link’s going to New York with Ridley and lied to his mom that it’s bible camp in grand Christian tradition.

For a second I considered telling Link everything

Not very hard. More like in a general that’s a thing that could hypothetically happen way.

“Listen man, you’ve gotta trust me. Don’t get mixed up with her. She’s just using you. You’re gonna get hurt.”
He crushed a Coke can in his hand. “Oh, I get it. If the hottest girl in town is hangin’ out with me, she must be usin’ me? I guess you think you’re the only one who can pull a hot chick. When did you get so full of yourself?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
Link got up. “I think we both know what you’re sayin’. Forget I asked.”
It was too late. Ridley had already gotten to him.

Yes, it was the evil bitch-whore and her seductive vagina, not the fact you have consistently failed to say anything halfway convincing on the subject. It shouldn’t be hard! If you don’t want to explain the exact truth, luckily the general truth also has your back, and you also don’t have any trouble lying so you could just run with that.

“Listen man, her cousin is honest to god psycho. When she took me up to Lena’s place she tried to kill me.”
“Listen man, all that stuff they were saying about Lena at the meeting? Her cousin actually did that shit.”
“Listen man, she cut off the cock of her last boyfriend, just straight up hacked it off with a kitchen knife.”
“Listen man, she fucks goats.”

Don’t tell me he wouldn’t say someone fucks goats. They have been gleefully going on about what an evil witch Ridley is, I’m sure he’d be happy to throw any of the usual witch accusations at her and see what sticks.

Nothing I said was going to change his mind. And I couldn’t lose my girlfriend and my best friend in the same day. “Listen, I didn’t mean it like that. I won’t say anything

No, apparently you prefer to see your best friend actually die a few days from now instead. I mean, you keep saying Ridley tried to kill you, why wouldn’t that be her plan now?

God, you moron. He handed you a way to actually prevent this without having to talk him out of it and nope, bro code says secrecy is more important than preventing your friend from getting to see his intestines close up.

And he’s not just saying that.

Emily was eyeing him. “You’d better go before Emily rats you out to your mom. Then you won’t be going to any church camp, real or imaginary.”

Ridley is simultaneously super deadly evil and not actually a big enough deal to be worse than Link spending winter break at home.

On to more Christmasy stuff.

I found a whole little town, lit by little white lights, that my Mom used to lay out every year under the Christmas tree, on a piece of cotton we pretended was snow.

Aw that’s really wait fuck.

my Mom

Well, on the brighter side, this may be proof that people who write for a living no longer care about the English language, but it’s hopefully also proof that no, an editor didn’t read this over and deliberately give the go-ahead on doing a very special lesson about racism being wrong when it’s happening to powerful rich hot white girls.

That can’t really justify the part where plenty of other people read it and recommended it and thought it’d make a great movie, but, it’s something.

The houses were her grandmother’s, and she had loved them so much that I had loved them, even though they were made of flimsy cardboard, glue, and glitter, and half the time they fell over when I tried to stand them up. “Old things are better than new things, because they’ve got stories in them, Ethan.” She would hold up an old tin car and say, “Imagine my great-grandmother playing with this same car, arranging this same town under her tree, just like we are now.”

Also somehow her grandmother’s houses were played with by her great-grandmother.
I’m sorry it’s all very cute and touching except it’s so goddamn stupid I mean really. I think it’s a simple mixup where it should be “your great-grandmother” but still that’s such a dumb error to make.

He can’t find the rest of it and that’s honestly sad. We have all sorts of Christmas decorations. Mom bought a lot of new ones when we moved to a bigger house, but my favorites are the very old and battered ones I’ve set up since I was a little kid.

This all feels really weird.

Emothan certainly hasn’t been emotionless, but his many, many emotions have not had much to do with his mom. We get the occasional mention of his mom being dead and his dad checking out, but it really seems like it’s more a sympathy ploy by the author. Mostly, he just hates everyone else.

But here we’re finally seeing him with not only positive emotions but subtle ones.

Probably too subtle, admittedly. Both my parents are still alive and my dead grandparents died when I was much younger, so I don’t really know how someone would handle the death, but…I just really can’t see this as possible. And I’m even a big fan of bottling up sadness instead of thinking about it! But he’s been too casual for that to work. He never seems to be avoiding thinking about this to keep a handle on things.

Still, he does seem to be starting to hit problems right now. He can’t find the rest of the boxes with the figures to go with the houses, and he sends Lena a confused ramble:

Everything’s missing. The boxes are there, but it’s all wrong. She’s not here. It’s not even a town anymore. And she’s never going to meet you.

To which Lena, naturally, doesn’t respond, leaving him to assume the connection’s gone and not that she has no idea what he just said so she’s ignoring it, and therefore he goes to the library because, he says, if you’re going to be alone you should go someplace you’ll be alone, which is why the library with Marian-she’s-like-a-member-of-our-family is the best bet. And indeed upon arrival he even goes to find her.

She’s hanging out with some books quoting stuff so let’s just skip over that.

“When I walked in this morning, these books were in a pile on the floor. I don’t know how they got there, or why. I locked the doors when I left last night, and they were still locked this morning. All I know is, I sat down to look through them, and every single book, every one of them, had some kind of message for me about this moment, in this town, right now. About Lena, you, even me.”
I shook my head. “It’s a coincidence. Books are like that.”

Even if we forgive everything else about Emothan, it’s lines like this that prove he has no business as a protagonist. But, in YA terms, this is exactly why he’s the protagonist. Constantly refusing to believe in magic keeps him reactive. He’ll never try out anything new because every important thing that happens has to be explained to him first.

“‘Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.’
“What does that have to do with me?”

What it has to do with you is demonstrating I shouldn’t really care about what happens to you. I’m not saying that like, it’d actually be right to kill you for this, I’m just saying, if it happens it’ll be sort of inevitable and also kind of utterly deserved. Other people have to get through life without books falling into their lap while someone explains the whole meaningful passage thing and then low and behold there’s a passage on exactly the topic he’s concerned about. And yet that’s too much to ask from him. I mean, the thing he’s been reading about fate was talking about the moon, not stars, how could there be any connection.

Marian, no doubt so used to this she doesn’t so much as blink, walks him through it and says it’s asking if you or the stars are master of your fate, so which he says “Are you talking about Lena, or Julius Caesar? Because I hate to break it to you, but I never read the play.” because he is bound and determined to be an idiot to the last. Then he says he wants to see his mom’s desk again, and Marian rambles the usual stuff about not feeling her in the graveyard.

“I still can’t think about her being there. It doesn’t make sense. Why would you stick someone you love down in a lonely old hole in the dirt? Where it’s cold, and dirty, and full of bugs? That can’t be how it ends, after everything, after everything she was.” I tried not to think about it, her body turning into bone and mud and dust down there.

That’s why cremation is so great.

Also, the reason you do it is because otherwise you have to watch it rot up there and that’s a lot worse.

I wonder if maybe the idea was for this to have happened further back? Changing it from a couple months ago to a couple years ago and the way everyone’s treating it makes so much more sense.

But hey, there’s a momentary glimmer of a positive female friendship. Let’s take a moment to appreciate this, because we’re already got the implication Marian kind of knows what happened to her and there’s a chance we could get the reveal that she’s involved in some way.

Among her books, he finds a Gatlin cookbook that’s got a fresh rosemary bookmark and opens to Betty Burton’s Buttermilk Pan Fried Tomatoes, which was her very favorite recipe. Between this and the way his thoughts here jump from her to Lena and back, it’s getting a tad oedipal.

I wanted to ask Marian about the rosemary in the cookbook, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear to show it to anyone else, or to part with it. Even though I had never and probably would never fry a tomato in my entire life. I stuck the book under my arm as Marian walked me to the door.

Let’s take a moment to try to picture how different this book would be if anyone in it was the type of person to talk to other people about anything.

He and Marian would actually interact like people who knew each other! Instead of digging up the one book we know the Genevieve had on hand and which, if there was a solution in it, she’d presumably have used, Marian could be helping them look through lots and lots and lots of other books, including aiding with translation. They could be learning all sorts of interesting facts about caster society along the way, and lots of stuff about the dark and light powers, claiming, etc. Pretty Suit would have explained the actual reasons he’d trying to keep them apart, and we’d have had someone sit down and explain how binding and stuff works by now.

And as a result, whatever solution they finally came up would seem more plausible than if they somehow find the answer despite not knowing a tenth of what everyone else before them knew.

When he goes home he finds it’s snowing, and it turns out Lena did it for him and they kiss.

You know, it occurs to me that weather control power would actually turn into one of those great-responsibility things, like a broader scale version of raising the dead. You think of all the places where people die from droughts or floods… It’d just be a superman situation if she can do it by pure magic, but if it’s a matter of redirecting existing water… Hm, but there is an awful lot of rain that just goes into the ocean, maybe you could poach it from there to stop a drought one place without wrecking the water table of another? I wonder if that’d have any repercussions.

“I don’t care if you’re grounded. I’m not. I’ll move into your house if I have to, and sleep with Boo in his dog bed.”
“He has a bedroom. He sleeps in a four-poster bed.”

I feel like there’s either going to be no explanation at all for Boo or he’ll turn out to be a transformed human, neither of which seems a good option.

Also, he continues to be totally inconsistent – sometimes he follows them everywhere, sometimes he’s oblivious to whatever Lena’s doing. It’s all as the plot demands.

She kissed me back. The snow fell harder, dripping off us. We were practically radioactive.

If by practically you mean were not in any sense.

Anyway, she’s decided that instead of dumping him because there’s so little time they’ll have left, they should enjoy it because there’s so little time they’ll have left.

They head inside and he hears his dad moving upstairs.

“My dad wasn’t like this until my mom died. He just flipped out after that.” I didn’t have to say the rest; she’d heard me think it enough times. About how my mom died, and we stopped cooking fried tomatoes, and we lost the little pieces of the Christmas town, and she wasn’t there to stand up to Mrs. Lincoln, and nothing was ever the same again.

And that’s sad, I guess, but like everything with his mom, it’s just not integrated.

He’s talked about food a lot, it’s one of the few things that does get detail here, and he’s never seemed to view it as anything other than the standard meals he always eats. If, instead of Amma cooking enormous meals, he’d been living off boiled hot dogs and sandwiches, this would fit so much better. And if there was some sense that his mom actually did anything within the community – up until now, all he’s said is she was different and didn’t get along well with the rest.

In the Discworld book The Wee Free Men, the main character talks about her dead grandmother a bit like this. The difference is that her grandmother was actually part of the community, and you can feel the loss of her. Tiffany doesn’t say “My grandmother thought all those dumb bitches in town were dumb and she hated skirts and she was so independent and different!” She talks about what her grandmother did, how she solved problems and held people together, and when things go wrong she thinks of how her grandmother would know how to deal with this. And you can feel how much she misses the women, because she thinks of her often and fondly.

Instead here, in this book:

“I’m sorry.”
“I know.”

And then he tells her hey, check out this trick door – if I stand in front of the locked study, it’ll open!

the door began to unbolt itself. She stopped laughing.
That’s not a Cast. I would be able to feel it.

But we know there’s at least three magic types – caster magic, whatever the Lilith-spawn have, and voodoo – even if we assume the ghosts are caster ghosts, there’s still the issue of the protective charms.

I think I’m supposed to go in, or we are.

What? Why would it be a “we” if it opened just for you last time? Where are you getting this stuff?

Also, Emothan shows that if he takes a step backward the door rebolts, which suggests it’s definitely not a we affair. It also suggests there’s no energy requirement for magical actions – the bolt isn’t weighted or anything, it’s not going to flip back into place as soon as the ghost/genus loci stops, so that means that whatever is doing this is rebolting the door in response to Emothan backing up. But there being no energy requirement then begs the new question of why whatever it is doesn’t act more obviously – usually, you assume that whatever-it-is has limited power and can only affect things a little.

Lena goes right for the novel.

“Ethan.”
“Don’t turn on the light. I don’t want him to come down here and freak out on us. He’d kill me if he knew we were in here. All he cares about is his book.”
She handed me the paper, without a word. I took it. It was covered with scribbles. Not scribbled words, just scribbles. I grabbed a handful of the papers closest to me. They were covered with squiggly lines and shapes, and more scribbles. I picked up a piece of paper from the floor, nothing but tiny rows of circles. I tore through the stacks of white paper littering his desk and the floor. More scribbles and shapes, pages and pages of them. Not a single word. Then I understood. There was no book.
My father wasn’t a writer. He wasn’t even a vampire.
He was a madman.

Well. That’s a good reveal. And Emothan reacts well too, with a bout of nausea.

Lena tries to tell him it’ll be okay, his dad will get better, with Emothan rightly rejecting this. But, because it’s Emothan, he has to keep going:

What had my father been doing all this time, avoiding me? What was the point of sleeping all day and working all night, if you weren’t working on the great American novel? If you were scribbling rows and rows of circles? Escaping from your only child? Did Amma know? Was everyone in on the joke but me?

So the realization that his dad has gone crazy is quickly discarded for how everyone is just deliberately making his life harder.

Then his dad comes down and Lena shouts DOOR to close the door just like she does in her room because apparently all old houses are set up to be magically reactive and Ravenwood just seems more magical because it’s got magical people messing with it.

“Look at the painting.” She righted it, amidst the books on the floor.
It was a painting of me.
Me, as a Confederate soldier, in 1865. But it was me, nonetheless.

This would’ve been a better revelation before we had it explicitly laid out that the guy was his ancestor with the exact same name who was in love with Lena’s ancestor and otherwise beat us over the head with the parallel. I’ve been assuming he was a clone of the guy from the start. And definitely before he saw the guy in his vision, which makes the picture outright pointless.

Then I noticed the books.
“Look.” I knelt on the floor in front of the nearest one. It was open to page 3.
I flipped the page to 4 and it flipped back to 3. Just like the bolt on the study door.

You’ll notice he immediately identifies the page number and not what’s actually on the page, even though the just-introduced idea of meaningful book pages said you’re supposed to read it and even though that’s what he did when seeing the recipe. This is because what’ll be important now is the page numbers and he Just Knows that’s what matters.

After he already knows this, he then discovers it:

“But this page doesn’t say anything, it’s a chart. Marian’s books were open to certain pages because they were trying to tell us something, like messages.

Yes, because everyone who knows anything about books knows that charts are only there as meaningless decoration. They’re the parsley of books.

Lena considered the next book. “Page 1. This is just the title page. It can’t be the content.”

Seriously? How about you tell us what the damn title is and we try to work out if that seems useful or not before just dismissing it completely?

Also, since when is the title page Page 1?

Many books, irritatingly, do have blank pages. If all the pages they were open to were some blank betweener pages, then it’d have to be the numbers – at least, after they ruled out invisible ink. Or, if we actually heard about what the pages contained, maybe they could try to figure it out for a while but find nothing meaningful, and then they could think to try to page numbers.

“Why would she leave me a code?” I was thinking out loud, but Lena still had the answer.
“Because you always know the end of the movie. Because you grew up with Amma and the mystery novels and the crosswords. Maybe your mom thought you would figure out something that no one else would get.”

No, that’s idiotic.

If the books were artfully arranged like this, sure. But they verified the pages by trying to flip them and watching his mom’s ghost or whatever flipping them back. It’s like if he was watching the bolt that only opens when he’s there and saying that the door’s always been unlocked and his mom just knew only he’d think to try opening it.

Naturally, it’s the simplest of cyphers, where A=1 etc, except, of course, there doesn’t appear to be any order the books are in.

And again, given there’s a ghost or whatever, the way they could communicate is open book, see number, write down, close book, reopen for next number. All of these are being manually done by the ghost right now.

It was as clear as if my mom was standing in the study, telling us in her own words, with her own voice.
CLAIMYOURSELF
It was a message for Lena.

Huh, that does seem to be pretty workable given her ancestor’s fuckup got her claimed dark, so if Lena tries to brute force a light spell during a dark period that might make light claim her. But you’d think that’d be obvious, so maybe there’s something super dangerous about trying and only a natural, with the greatest light/dark connection, can forge a new link. That actually fits with what little we know about the way magic works, so it seems an unlikely resolution.

My mom was there, in some form, in some sense, in some universe. My mom was still my mom, even if she only lived in books and door locks and the smell of fried tomatoes and old paper.
She lived.

Um, wait. There isn’t really any evidence it’s your mom yet. All we know is it’s in your house. It does seem to be using your mother’s books, but as a counterpoint, you haven’t checked out any other books and if you had, you wouldn’t have been looking for a code. The it only thing that’s particularly connected to your mother is her favorite recipe, and that was marked with a Lena-signifier, so it could just as easily be a spirit trying to get your attention by taking two meaningful things – a Lena bookmark in your mother’s favorite recipe.

Particularly when that Lena bookmark is out of left field – there’s no reason why his mother would know the solution to Lena’s problem. She did seem to be studying Genevieve, but she’s not a caster and besides, I’m sure there’s curses all over the place if it’s this easy, so why concern herself with this? And if the solution is this simple, why didn’t any of Lena’s apparently enormous family think of it before?

Most worrying, Amma deals with ghosts. Why doesn’t she know there’s a ghost here if that’s what’s going on? Either she can’t tell, or she’s lying about it.

Anyway, with that done he opens the door to confront his dad. Which he does with shouting and accusations.

Were going to tell me that you’ve been locked in your study for months doing this?” I held up one of the crumpled pages in my hand.
He looked down at the floor. My dad may have been crazy, but he was still sane enough to know that I had figured out the truth.

Okay, see, part of it being “crazy” is that it is probably not a personal affront to you, it is being crazy. This would be bad enough if he was just refusing to believe it was mental illness, but no, he immediately says his dad’s insane.

He says he spends his time here because it’s where she was and he can feel like she’s still there.

He walked past me, back into the study, and bent down to pick up one of the pages covered with circles. His hand was shaking. “I was tryin’ to write.” He looked over at my mom’s chair. “I just don’t know what to write anymore.”
It wasn’t about me. It had never been about me.

No shit, you self-centered little asshole.

But now I knew she wasn’t gone, and everything was different. My dad didn’t know.

Note that tense. His dad doesn’t know. His dad will continue to not know, because god forbid, faced with his father going insane from grief, he should say anything to try to help the guy.

What’s particularly horrible here is:

She wasn’t unlocking doors for him and leaving him messages.

How the fuck do you know? He just claimed to still be able to smell fried green tomatoes, to feel her presence somehow. Maybe she’s trying to communicate with him too. It’s taken you months just to get from door magically opening to I guess I should try entered the magically open door, and you know magic is real. Maybe he’s been ignoring that stuff because he thinks he’s going insane.

The next week, on Christmas Eve

He still hasn’t told his father.

When he comes in to find his dad with slit wrists or hanging from the rafters, he’ll probably just yell at the corpse for doing it to spite him.